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What's in a Name: Toponyms As Linguistic Data for Historical

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What's in a Name: Toponyms As Linguistic Data for Historical What’s in a Name: Toponyms as Linguistic Data for Historical Comparison Elizabeth Peters Haverford College Tri-College Department in Linguistics December 9, 2014 Peters 2 A full picture of the linguistic mechanics and social importance of a language can only be arrived at through study of both contemporary and historical states of that language. There are languages, however, for which data is limited. For languages with limited contemporary resources, toponymic data can comprise a large portion of the available information. Analysis of toponyms, however, requires some degree of loss of precision due to obscured phonology and morphology over time. Based largely on toponymic data, Kenneth Jackson (1955) argued for the P- Celtic ancestry of Pictish, and his theory became the prevailing one. Katharine Forsyth (1997) and Alfred P. Smyth (1984) critique his arguments on cultural- linguistic terms. In this paper, I assess the use of toponymic data for studying linguistic relatedness through the application of similar methods to a language with known familial classification. I use the comparative method to analyze the linguistic relatedness of Lenape and Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, Western Abenaki, and Cherokee. The Lenape data consists only of toponyms with attested Lenape heritage. Systematic sound correspondences are found between Lenape and each of the compared languages. Previous scholarship claims that Lenape is related to Passamaquoddy and to Western Abenaki, but not to Cherokee. The absence of this distinction in the analysis of Lenape toponymic data suggests that toponymic data does not provide enough or reliable enough information for historical comparison. 1. Languages with limited resources. An ideal description of a language will encompass both contemporary and historical states of that language, and will encompass all facets of linguistic expression, including spoken and written modes, if both exist.1 Spoken data is valuable because it reflects the grammar, usage, and phonology of the language for a real speaker. Written data can reflect these things, but they can often be obscured by artifacts of borrowing (for instance chaise longue is [ʃɛz lɔŋg] in French, but becomes [͡tʃeɪz laʊnd͡ ʒ], spelled chaise lounge, in English), formality (including poetic syntax structures), and orthography (for example, pronunciation is obscured in the orthographic representation of awry and indict). Written data is valuable, however, in that it can record historical states of a language. Moreover, there are languages for which the only data available is written. Some of these are languages of extinct Mediterranean or Christian civilizations, including Akkadian, Vulgar Latin, and Old Low Franconian. Many of these languages also have modern descendants, which can provide information about the historical phonology, syntax, morphology, and semantics when studied with the comparative method. For some languages, 1 Thanks are due to Professor Brook Lillehaugen for suggestions and support throughout the writing process, and to Mariana Irby for the same. Peters 3 however, neither spoken nor written resources exist in significant enough quantity to produce a reliable picture of the language. In certain cases, the only method of inquiry is through historical reconstruction by comparison of modern descendants. Other languages have left small preserved traces in personal or national names or in the toponymy of the region their people inhabited. This paper explores the reliability of toponymic data in historical comparison through a study of the linguistic relationships between Lenape (ISO 639-3 code [unm], Lewis et al. 2014) and Passamaquoddy-Maliseet (ISO 639-3 code [pqm], Lewis et al. 2014), Western Abenaki (ISO 639-3 code [abe], Lewis et al. 2014), and Cherokee (ISO 639-3 code [chr], Lewis et al. 2014). Based on the results of this study, toponyms are found to not give enough reliable information to rule out the possibility that correspondences appear by chance; therefore, claims of language relatedness based entirely on toponymic data are unreliable. Toponymic data should be used only with caution and in tandem with other sources of data in future studies of language history and relatedness. In section 2 of this paper, I provide a background on the use of toponymic data in linguistic studies, including a discussion of one particular study using primarily toponymic data, Jackson (1955). Section 3 describes the current study, based on Lenape toponyms, including methods and goals. The process of creating the data set for Lenape, Passamaquoddy, Western Abenaki, and Cherokee is found in section 4, and section 5 outlines the analysis of that data. Section 6 includes a discussion and evaluation of the analysis. The conclusions of this study and their repercussions for future uses of toponymic data are included in section 7. 2. Toponyms as linguistic data. Toponyms are useful as historic linguistic data because they tend to be remarkably resistant to change, and thus frequently preserve archaisms (Smyth 1984: 4, Forsyth 1997: 22). This phenomenon can be seen in toponyms in England ending in –by, Old Norse ‘farmstead’ (Ordnance Survey 2014). Such places are concentrated in the northeast of England, in the region formerly comprising the Danelaw (Briggs 2009). Despite Scandinavian languages having not been widely spoken in that region for hundreds of years, there are towns such as Houseby and Tiptoby still bearing that suffix (Ordnance Survey 2014). The archaic form is preserved even though the linguistic community no longer exists. Peters 4 Toponyms can undergo change when they are borrowed into other languages. The French roots of the city of Des Moines, Iowa, are preserved in the spelling of the city’s name, despite the area having been predominantly English-speaking for two hundred years. The pronunciation of Des Moines, however, has been anglicized from the French [de mu͡ ĩ] to English [də mo͡ ĩn]. If the United States had not had a tradition of regularized spelling of toponyms through legal action (Des Moines Public Library) the French heritage of Des Moines would be obscured. In addition, any historical comparison done based on the modern pronunciation of Des Moines would produce a false picture of French as spoken in the New World colonies. Despite the difficulties introduced by the preservation of archaisms and change through borrowing, the etymology of toponyms in many regions has been extensively studied and speculated upon. How a society names its surroundings exposes how people conceptualize their world: how landforms are distinguished, how people interact with the land, how land is owned or distributed, or how places or topographic features are important spiritually, politically, or historically (Nash and Simpson 2012). In a toponym is encoded a literal meaning, a lexified denotation, historical and folk etymologies, connotations, and physical properties of the place described (Nash and Simpson 2012). In addition, toponyms may preserve linguistic features that do not appear elsewhere in the language with any frequency, particularly locative morphemes (Nash and Simpson 2012). For these reasons, toponyms can comprise an important portion of linguistic data. Their usefulness as linguistic data is strongly tied, however, to their relationship to the morphology, semantics, and phonology of the language as a whole. The full extent of the meaning of a toponym cannot be understood without comparison to other sources of data. A linguistic study based on toponymic data must bear in mind these properties of toponyms, and particularly their limitations. 2.1. Using toponymic data to studying linguistic relatedness. An exemplary use of toponymic data for the study of linguistic relatedness is Kenneth Jackson’s (1955) arguments regarding Pictish. There is very little evidence for the Pictish language, and most of what data does exist is comprised of toponyms (Jackson 1955: 133). As a result of the scarcity of information, the cultural and linguistic identity of the Picts has been highly contested since the late nineteenth century (Jackson 1955: 132). The Picts were a people who inhabited the northern part of the British Isle, in what is now Scotland, before the arrival of the Romans and Peters 5 through the early Middle Ages. Despite their longevity and political prowess, very little is known about this people. The Picts have been claimed as the historical ancestors of the Scottish people in nationalistic movements to distinguish themselves from the Anglo-Saxon English and from the Celtic Irish and Welsh (see Pictish Nation as an example). In scholarly contexts, however, who exactly the Picts were politically, culturally, and linguistically remains contested. Bede’s writings (and also the Life of Saint Columba, in which Adomnan references Columba’s need for a translator when missionizing to the Picts) suggest that the Picts existed as a political and linguistic entity separate from others in Britain; however, the exact nature of this entity is not described (Jackson 1955: 142). Since then, Pictish has been placed in different linguistic families by different scholars. It has been argued to be a Q-Celtic language related to modern Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic (Letter A in Figure 1: Skene 1836; Nicholson 1896, 1904; Fraser 1923, 1927; Diack 1944. As cited in Jackson 1955: 132), a P-Celtic language related to modern Welsh, Cornish, and Breton (Letter B in Figure 1: Stokes 1890; Macbain 1892; Watson 1926; O’Hahilly 1946. As cited in Jackson 1955: 132), a non-Celtic
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